The Dead man Inside the Undead One
by Madam Irralee
Summary: Dracula was once human. What is the man inside the demon thinking while he watches peoples die at his hands? One-shot.


The Dead man Inside the Undead One

Pearly white canines hovered tantalizingly close to the white arch of Lucy's neck, two small wounds visible from his past visits. His teeth sliced though her flesh like two fine needles.

Blood flowed freely into Dracula's mouth and trickled down his moustache. He sampled the blood like another man would sample wine. Death will be visiting this house soon, he thought. His eyes, little more than black orbs, observed the sleeping woman's grey skin, shallow breaths, and the purple circles below both her tightly shut eyes.

Dracula smiled. It was not a pleasant smile; if a vulture hovering over a dying creature could have smiled, it would have looked the same.

"Soon you shall be joining your sisters in death at my side." He whispers into her ear. She twitches away from his foul breath even in her dreams as he continues, "Your friends will prove unable to save your soul."

At the very back of his mind, a man who had himself died at the hands of another vampire seven hundred years before dropped to his knees. _Oh please stop this…please…_

* * *

"Those vile pests! How dare they, _how dare they. _I shall make them suffer so even the angels turn away in horror. They will reach for death in hope and I shall rip it from their grasp!" Dracula paced the underbelly of the ship, his last safe place on earth a box of dirt from his ancestral castle.

Wind like a ghost's mournful crying filter down to him. The sailors stopped to listen for a moment, then as the storm gathered force, hurried on about their work. The clouds wept like children, their noisy soggy tears falling from the sky.

"I had not expected quite such a resolve from that woman's companions; to drive a stake through her heart themselves."

Dracula smashed his fist through one of the wooden crates which accompanied his in this rat-infested hold. The wood splintered and cracked, and salt spilled over the floor.

The little man at the back of his mind was _smiling_, and completely out reach.

"The girl still died." Dracula told the man, "And I have the other one within my power."

_But now her friends hunt you, and they will find you, and then…and then you die and I will be _free_._ The word free echoed and re-echoed among his thought, like a long forgotten name.

_Free…Free…Free…Free…_

Dracula shuddered; icy cold knives of memory stabbed him again and again. People he didn't know, places he had never been, tastes and smells he had never sensed, all crept from the dusty shadows of his mind.

Something was beginning, and he did not have the slightest idea what it was.

_Free…Free…Free…Free…_

* * *

The sun peeked over the horizon, shedding its blood-stained rays of light over the desolate tundra.

For the first time in centuries, Dracula felt the steet-tipped claws of terror sink into his flesh. He was greater than a mere human, so how could one of those worthless creatures end his life?

The stake moved through the air, straight and true. An unearthly scream of agony, and animalistic terror ripped forth from the undead's throat as the stake tore the flesh apart.

The room of Dracula's mind, filled by dust and decay for so many long years, started growing light. And from edge of the demon's thoughts, from which he spent so many years watching, the man who had once been Vlad Dracula stepped forward.

"Come to torment me in my dying moments?" The vampire asked the human.

Vlad Dracula halted, face still wreathed in shadows. _No. Our body can no longer hurt any human. We are at peace. We are Free._

Dracula blinked, he felt alive, even as the breath stilled in his lungs and his heart stopped its steady pumping of life through his veins. The deep waters of undeath that had held him in this world far too long fell into nothingness.

Vlad Dracula smiled a joyful if faintly sad smile, and as calmly as a child going to sleep, he died. He left the world as human, just as he came into it. Around his corpse people wondered why the demon seemed so happy to die; it was almost as if he wanted to, they said.


End file.
